I had an idea for a long time of wanting to do a big story centered around Preservation, the planet, or in the Preservation system, with something happening there. I would like to be able to do that. Usually, I come up with ideas and think, ‘Oh, I’ll do this book,’ and then it barely touches on that or there’s just not enough room in the book to get everything done. But that’s really something I’m hoping to do in the next book, if I can come up with a good idea.
"Fugitive Telemetry" has come to be my favorite book in the whole series, largely because it is set on the Preservation planet and is about the problems Murderbot experiences with fitting into that society. Which causes Murderbot's friends from the Preservation Aux team to come in conflict with their own society, as in the excellent scene where the head of security on Preservation, Senior Indah, has a meeting with Murderbot, Mensah and Pin Lee, who is acting as Murderbot's lawyer. During the meeting Murderbot discovers that Pin Lee is building a legal case against Indah because Pin-Lee doesn't like Indah's attitude towards Murderbot.
This was also the last time we saw Pin-Lee, one of my favorite characters in the series. Which is now three books ago in the Murderbot Universe timeline. But that's one of my gripes with the series - Wells creates these great characters and then leaves them behind to write about new characters. I mean, what happened with Ratthi and Tarik?
THE REST OF THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT PLATFORM DECAY
I mentioned a few months ago that Ian Leslie does a bang-up job in his book "John and Paul a Love Story in Songs" in analyzing not only the Lennon/McCartney relationship but also their music. I wrote that Leslie "has quite a few excellent essays on lots of their songs. I will be discussing those later."
Now it's later.
Although Leslie has lots of interesting things to say about the Lennon/McCartney oeuvre, he really hits his stride with the album Revolver, particularly in his discussions of "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Eleanor Rigby." He points out that the two songs have a lot in common:
…both John and Paul came back from their break with songs about death written from a detached omniscient perspective. In “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John dispenses instruction from the mountain top. In two minutes, "Eleanor Rigby" captures the entire lives of two individuals in a series of stark images. Musically, both songs are stripped down to a few parts in order to distill and intensify some essence.
"Eleanor Rigby" confines itself to a narrow melodic range and the song has minimal harmonic development. Like “Tomorrow Never Knows” it alternates between just two chords set in a minor key.
Still it's hard to explain "Eleanor Rigby." Nobody had created a pop song like this before. Its cultural ubiquity has stopped us from noticing how strange it is, at least as radical in its way as "Tomorrow Never Knows,” which John came up with after hearing Paul play "Eleanor Rigby."
That last part resonates with me. I blogged about Eleanor Rigby almost ten years ago now, and I also commented on how surprising it is, especially since it was written by a 24-year-old pop star.
Leslie continues:
…Paul ends each line of "Eleanor Rigby" with a little commentary or question on what has preceded it: lives in a dream; who is it for; no one comes near. Similar to the gods-eye mode of Tomorrow Never Knows.
The two songs speak to one another. In "Tomorrow Never Knows," however distant Lennon's voice sounds, the message is ultimately soothing. "Eleanor Rigby" offers no comfort. It turns an unflinching, even acerbic gaze on its characters: a woman picks up rice in a church tidying up after a wedding, oblivious to joy. She lives in a dream and wears a face that nobody sees. In the second verse we meet Father McKenzie writing his sermon for nobody. In the third and final verse, they are brought together without coming together: he buries her in a perfunctory ritual. Everything is concise. economical and devastating: no one was saved.
Around this time both John and Paul were dwelling on the decline of Christianity. In Cleave's interview, John contrasted it with the rise in popularity of The Beatles a relatively mild observation that came back to haunt him. But in "Eleanor Rigby," Paul slid a knife into the bone...
And I also liked this description of "Tomorrow Never Knows."
...The finished track feels like standing in a full-force gale as the rubble of history blows by us. Lennon's voice surfs serenely above an unearthly concatenation of noises and Ringo's stuttering, pulverising drum beat. John commands the chaos and subdues its terrors, inviting us to consider the meaning of within and to play the game to the end of the beginning, a phrase that John Winston Lennon borrowed not from (Timothy) Leary, but from Churchill, who had died the year before. What they were now calling "The Void" was by far the strangest sounding track that The Beatles or any pop group had ever recorded. There was no girl or boy, no verse or chorus, just a continuous flow that loops around toggling between two chords and fades out on the word beginning. It brought together McCartney's experiments in sound with Lennon's desire to communicate truths about the meaning of life. It blended Indian music with Stockhausen; psychedelic philosophy with English poetry and comedy...
Leslie has a similar commentary for "Strawberry Fields Forever" which I will talk about soon.
He also talks about the origin of the title "Tomrrow Never Knows:"
Lennon decided that "The Void" as a title was too heavy. During a televised press conference in 1964, Ringo had expressed the unpredictability of the group's career by saying "tomorrow never knows." In the footage you can see Lennon cracking up behind him...
The Beatles, like Shakespeare, preferred to avoid portentousness.
And thanks to YouTube, we can see exactly what Leslie is talking about:
Would you say that the Matt character in the play "TALLEY'S FOLLY" is a stalker and even abusive towards Sally?
CLAUDE
This is a genuinely interesting question that touches on how we read romantic persistence in literature — and it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.
The case that Matt's behavior looks troubling by modern standards:
Despite writing to her daily for a year, Sally's only response was to ask him to stop. He nevertheless traveled to Lebanon to propose to her in person. eNotes By contemporary understanding of consent and boundaries, this is concerning — she told him to stop, and he escalated instead. In the old Talley boathouse, Sally denies her love for Matt, but he remains persistent eNotes, and undaunted by Sally's rejection and demands that he return home, Matt refuses to leave. EBSCO A pattern of ignoring "no," traveling to someone after being told to stop writing, and refusing to leave when asked to go home does fit behaviors we'd now flag as stalking.
The case for the play's intended romantic reading:
Wilson clearly frames this as a love story, not a thriller. Several contextual factors complicate a straightforward "stalker" label:
Sally suspected Matt would be waiting for her at the boathouse eNotes — suggesting she was not genuinely surprised or frightened, and chose to engage.
Sally's rejection of Matt's advances stems from her own internalized insecurities and a deep-seated belief that her worth is tied to motherhood EBSCO — Wilson frames her resistance as internal self-sabotage rather than genuine unwillingness to be with Matt.
Matt's persistence is written as coming from a place of genuine love and the belief that Sally is suppressing her true feelings, which the play ultimately validates — they do find each other.
The honest literary assessment:
The play belongs to a long tradition of romantic narratives where male persistence in the face of female refusal is coded as devotion rather than harassment. Wilson clearly intends Matt sympathetically. But a modern audience is right to notice the tension: the structure of "he kept pushing until she admitted her real feelings" can normalize the idea that "no" is just an obstacle to overcome, rather than a boundary to respect.
There's no physical abuse in the play, but the dynamic does involve a degree of emotional pressure — Matt essentially traps Sally in a conversation she's tried to avoid, and refuses to leave until she opens up. Whether that reads as romantic or coercive likely depends a great deal on the production and the audience's own lens.
It's a fair and thoughtful critique to raise, even if Wilson didn't intend it that way.
ME
Are you sure there's no physical abuse? At one point he blocks her exit from the boathouse, puts his hand over her mouth when she tries to call her brothers for help. and grabs her twice when she tries to escape.
CLAUDE
You are absolutely right, and I should not have stated so confidently that there was no physical abuse. Thank you for the correction.
Those actions — blocking her exit, covering her mouth to prevent her from calling for help, and grabbing her twice when she tries to leave — are genuinely physically coercive behaviors. Regardless of the romantic framing Wilson gives the play, those are not ambiguous gestures. Preventing someone from leaving, silencing them when they try to seek help, and physically grabbing them are textbook examples of physical coercion and controlling behavior.
When you layer those actions on top of what we already discussed — the year of unwanted letters, ignoring her request to stop, showing up anyway, and refusing to leave when asked — the cumulative picture is quite troubling. Matt systematically removes every avenue Sally has to say no or escape the situation: he ignores her written rejections, he won't leave verbally, he blocks her physical exit, and he silences her attempt to get outside help. That's a pattern, not a series of isolated romantic gestures.
The play's framing asks the audience to see all of this as proof of how much he loves her, and the "reward" of Sally opening up and accepting him is meant to retroactively justify his tactics. But that framing is itself part of the problem — it's a narrative that says the ends (she finally admitted she loves him!) justify the means (coercing her into the conversation by any method necessary).
So to directly answer your original question: yes, there is a strong case that Matt behaves as both a stalker and as someone who is physically coercive toward Sally. The fact that the play won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered a romantic classic doesn't erase that reading — if anything, it's worth examining why those behaviors were so readily romanticized.
ME
Thank you, this has been very helpful.
CLAUDE
You're welcome! It was a genuinely thought-provoking discussion. You clearly know the play well — your correction about the physical actions was important, and it strengthened the overall analysis considerably. Those specific details from the text made the case much more concrete than just debating the tone of romantic persistence.
It's the kind of close reading that's valuable to apply to celebrated works, since a Pulitzer Prize and a reputation as a romantic classic can sometimes cause audiences and critics to overlook dynamics that deserve scrutiny. Good luck with whatever you're working on with the play!
OK so Claude got sycophantic there - and Claude is ranked as one of the less-sycophantic chatbots as of this writing, believe it or not. Not gonna lie - I very much enjoyed the affirmation.
At least the leading male character of TALLEY'S FOLLY does not outright rape the leading female character, as is the case of THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES (a comedy, in case you couldn't tell) so it could definitely be worse.
On the other hand, I think TALLEY'S FOLLY is still performed much more often than The House of Blue Rape Culture. So the jihad continues.
Well it was kind of inevitable - I hate most plays, and although Hamnet is a movie, it purports to be about Shakespeare and his biggest banger of a play, Hamlet.
Now I love Hamlet, especially Derek Jacobi's Hamlet - but I like any version that plays up the humor in the "me thinks I see my father, Horatio" scene. After Hamlet says that line, Horatio says: "Where, my lord?" and looks around frantically because it so happens he just came directly from seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, and then Jacobi, as Hamlet with just the tiniest bit of impatience in his voice responds: "in my minds eye."
If there's one thing I hate about a play or movie, it's portentousness.
The "I see my father" bit comes at minute 20, not counting the accursed commercials. Here's what Jacobi looks like as he's saying "In my mind's eye."
Even in the middle of a capital-T tragedy, Shakespeare gets some humor in. Shakespeare was not portentous, which is why he is great, and Hamnet is not.
To my great relief I see I'm not the only one who feels that way. There are some great reviews out there, including ones that use the word "portentous." Let's enjoy.
Zhao conveys this exposition through tasteful images, an evocative if occasionally overdone score, and just a hint of the heavy emoting to come. In the first of the requisite agonized birth scenes, the director shows some restraint, as Agnes flees the oppressiveness of Will’s parental home to a favorite spot in the woods, a great tree with a dark opening where, as her crimson gown contrasts with the mossy green of the surroundings, she huddles to give birth. This image — the opening in a tree leading into blackness — will recur throughout the film, matched later by a doorway in the fake forest scenery at Will’s London theater that passes through illusion into the void.
That subtlety gives way to hamminess, mawkishness, and absurdity, a shameless effort to exploit the universal experiences of frustration, rage at iniquity, and grief. Mescal starts it off, chewing the scenery as a drunken Will agonizes in a candle-lit attic attempting to write his masterpieces. Agnes sees his need to escape the tyranny of his father, the strictures of a growing family, and the oppressiveness of a future as a glovemaker. She orders him to go off to seek his fortune in London.
Then it’s Buckley’s turn. Once again she gives birth, indulging in its agonies but with enough strength left over to endure a flashback to the death scene of her own mother. This time she gives birth to twins, but one, the girl, is stillborn! Everyone weeps! But no, Agnes coaxes her back to life! Tears of relief! But later, the plague strikes the 11-year-old bonded pair, first Judith, then Hamnet, who offers his life in return for hers to the specter of Death. He kicks the bucket entwined with his surviving sister — just before the errant father can rush home from touring with his company — giving Mescal the opportunity to indulge in the grief orgy with an added twist of guilt.
These performances bring to mind Hamlet’s thespian advice to the players:
O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.
I suspect Hamlet would not have approved of the acting in Hamnet.
Amen.
Oh Jesus, there is so much screaming in this movie. I like the review by Adam Nayman in "The New Republic" because it gives a shout-out to the far superior movie "Shakespeare in Love" even if Nayman and Harold Bloom (ugh) are a little snobby about it:
Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”
Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.
Oh man, he is not kidding about the primal screams. Thankfully I did not see it in the theater and could turn my computer audio down whenever someone started screaming again.
Unlike Hamnet, I actually did tear up at the end of "Shakespeare in Love" because it packs an actual dramatic punch, in spite of its humor and charm. And it was at least as popular as Hamnet, demonstrating that you can please people and still make a good movie about Shakespeare.
Having sat through it twice, it’s clear to me that Hamnet is not a film made up of intelligent choices. From the epigraph – explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are functionally the same name – to the finale scored to Max Richter’s Volvo advert-friendly “On the Nature of Daylight,” Hamnet is a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain. It has been marketed as a film that burrows down to a primal, base feeling – an effective way of writing off its crude creative decisions. It dramatises Shakespeare and his wife’s response to their son’s sudden death from the plague, and it has one mission statement that it knows you cannot find fault with: the death of a child is a universal tragedy. If you take issue with Hamnet creatively then you are, of course, a cold-blooded cynic who doesn’t possess enough love in their heart.
Even better, the review explains why the movie is so far from anything to do with the works of William Shakespeare:
Hamnet’s wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare’s work appear to make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction. It would be easy, then, to consider Hamnet a work of fan fiction, but Zhao is – by her own admission – not a fan of Shakespeare. She has spoken about how, as a Chinese-born filmmaker, she wasn’t raised with Shakespeare as a cultural standard-bearer and that she relied on O’Farrell and Mescal to navigate the text. But the plot of Hamlet cannot, like tracing paper, be cleanly laid over the life of William Shakespeare. Hamlet himself is the vengeful, arrogant Prince of Denmark, not a frightened little boy. There is a specific reason why O’Farrell maintained minimal reference to the play in her novel and focused almost entirely on Agnes’s internal maelstrom of emotions. Hamnet doesn’t actually make sense if you know even the tiniest thing about Hamlet.
Thus, Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s family life, the death of his eponymous young son and the staging of his – as well as the world’s – most famous play should have been a dream come true for a cinephile theatre critic like me. So keen were my friend Deb (a long-time admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel) and I to see the film that we went on the very first afternoon of its release last week. Reader, I hated it, and so did Deb, finding it unforgivably overwrought and portentous...
Exactly. Portentous!
The Globe was a famously rumbustious place, and yet in this film, a reverential silence cloaks the audience from the very first line (and let’s not forget that Hamlet’s unedited running time is more than four hours). They are, Zhao is at great pains to tell us, utterly bewitched by the magnificence of Shakespeare’s words; I confidently predict that theatre sceptics who watch this will have all their worst assumptions confirmed for ever more.
Agnes alone, of course, understands the real life rooting and connections behind the play, so I’d have been more than happy for Buckley to be visibly transfixed and to hold out her hand to the young actor playing Hamlet during his Act Five death scene. But the whole audience doing this? Come on. After four hours, a good percentage of them would have been less rapturous and more desperate for a pee. Idolising – embalming, even – theatre like this does no one any good.
Hamnet fails tragically, comically, pastorially and historically.
I feel about Hamnet fans the same as I feel about fans of "Love Actually" - they are so insensitive and unperceptive that they need to be bashed in the face with ham-fisted hysterics to feel anything.
And it sounds good - I was especially happy to see that a bad guy character with some humanizing tendencies is back:
Murderbot encounters another unexpected obstacle: Supervisor Leonide, a higher-up in the Corporation Rim, who convinces the reluctant robot to help her family, sending it on a long and dangerous quest to rescue five more humans.
Well Sprinter never had a chance, the weather leapt from Arctic levels of cold two weeks ago to 77 degrees today. Completely bonkers.
I took advantage of the weather to finally explore my new neighborhood, although it isn't completely new since I used to work nearby.
I visited some of my old haunts today including the glacial erratic. Back in the day, in 2014 to be exact, this ancient rock, resting immovable in the middle of a side street got no respect. There were parking lots for nearby businesses all around and people even used the rock itself for parking - I took a picture myself back then, which you can see here.
These days the entire block is a park dedicated to the rock, with tables and benches and several lively cafes nearby. Although I will say, the little park is fairly neglected, I saw a lot of garbage strewn here and there including some on the rock itself. Somebody needs to start a volunteer club to take care of the park. It deserves at least some of the care given to Central Park, which has teams of volunteers working to keep clean seven days a week.
Not far away from the rock - I don't think anybody has given it a name - is a cafe called The Local, where I used to go and hang out during the work day, so I stopped in to check it out. It's still pretty much as I remember it.
I wonder if the French are still crazy about Long Island City - that was apparently a thing back in 2017. My own theory was that they liked it because the movie Julia and Julie - the Julia was "the French Chef" Julia Child - is set there. I did hear a couple of guys speaking French in a different cafe the other day, so I wouldn't be surprised.
The Julie in the movie had a blog, back in the early days of blogging. Now it's a thing of the past. Except for some of us.
I'm a big fan of the restaurant Chez Ma Tante in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, so I was there on Sunday.
Only to find out that I missed Mamdani, who was also there that night!
We went for an early dinner so probably left before he got there. Oh well, I'm glad that even though he lives in Gracie Mansion now, on the Upper East Side, he hasn't forgotten us here in the "commie corridor."
Bud Cort is dead. He made it to 77. His much older co-star in Harold and Maude, Ruth Gordon, made it to 88.
I've mentioned Harold and Maude on this blog a few times over the years. I first saw it in my teens and it had an impact on me. I was glad the NYTimes chose the image of Cort, as Harold Chasen, the morning after spending the night with Maude, as he is blowing bubbles. The implication is that Harold lost his virginity and the shot makes that obvious.
I realize the film's director Hal Ashby deserves a lot of the credit for the shots and the vividness and pacing of the film, and Ruth Gordon was the prefect casting choice, but the New York Times notes that Cort added his own personal touch to the film:
Mr. Cort was 21 when he played the part of Harold with wry confidence; many of his most memorable moments, like a fourth-wall-breaking smile into the camera, were his idea.
This is what they're talking about.
I can't be the only one who thinks that young Bud Cort looks like Cole Escola.
Cort didn't have the most spectacular career, but thanks to Harold and Maude, he is immortal.
Harket demonstrates a vocal range of over two and a half octaves.[14] He sings the lowest pitch in the song, A2 (the tonic), at the beginning of the chorus, on the first syllable of the phrase "Take On Me".[14] As the chorus progresses, Harket's voice hits ever higher notes, reaching a falsetto[12][16][17] and hitting the song's highest note, E5, (the dominant) at the end.[14] Rolling Stone has thus noted the song as "having one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history".
It really is something.
And then I discovered that the band Walk Off the Earth did a cover.
Anyway the vocals on Walk Off the Earth's cover of "Take On Me" are not quite as swooping and exciting, but they are impressive, and the almost nil electronica would have made even dumb 23-year-old me happy.
I had to hire a separate mover to move my plants, since I was afraid if I used a regular mover for my plants, they could end up sitting in an ice cold truck for hours.
So I had to get a Task Rabbit guy with a heated van to move the plants. And my orchid and all the other plants survived very well.
But orchid is definitely outgrowing its pot - time to repot this spring.
I found shelter on Roosevelt Island, within the first year of Covid, after I left the Upper West Side. It's a quiet place, part retirement community and part college campus - a lot of people living in my building were associated with Cornell University which has an actual college campus on the south end of the Island.
And I really loved my apartment, with its spectacular view. And I enjoyed living in the middle of the East River, and could walk around the entire island in two hours, more or less.
I could only afford to live in that apartment because rents were in the basement thanks to Covid - but once Covid was over, landlords all over New York started making up for lost rent, plus extra. My rent went up by $1300 in the five years I lived there, and finally, in spite of annual raises, I was priced right out.
I'm sure this rent-hike mania on the part of the haves is what made so many have-nots vote for Mamdani. That was certainly one reason I voted for him, although just the fact that he wasn't: a former governor and sexual assaulter who was chummy with Trump; a corrupt mayor who was chummy with Trump; or a crazy cat man were enough reasons to vote for him.
So now I'm over here living in the Commie Corridor. My apartment view is not spectacular, although at least I can see the Empire State Building from my street.
When last I talked about the orchid, I thought it might bloom all the way into autumn, but that didn't happen. It took a break from mid-September until early January.
There was quite a bit to talk about after that first pass, but I've listened to the audiobook version several times since then, as well as watching or listening to a bunch of podcasts with Leslie, and I have more thoughts about the book now.
First, it's a love story in 43 songs, which I put together as an Apple Music playlist, and made available here. It's 2 hours and 24 minutes long.
Although Leslie doesn't only talk about the 43 songs named as chapter titles. I especially liked his discussion of I Know (I Know) from Lennon's "Mind Games." See below for more.
It's a very good book, since Leslie takes a new approach to Beatleography with the focus on the John/Paul partnership. His thesis is that John and Paul had a romantic, but not sexual, relationship, although Leslie does speculate, with some evidence, that Lennon was a bit on the bi-side. It's a very interesting idea, although I felt he stretched it a little, occasionally.
Leslie takes this idea the furthest in the chapter "Look at Me" and it gets pretty sexy:
John said that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him. McCartney was nonplussed at John's anger towards him in the late 60s and early 70s, which seemed to go beyond the normal frustrations of co-working or the annoyances of friends. Even Yoko was baffled by John's animus towards Paul. She speculated to Phillip Norman (Beatles and Lennon biographer) that John might have contemplated an affair with Paul and that Paul rejected him. "I knew there was something going on here," she said. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about."
Yoko kept an audio diary in 1968, on the 4th of June, a month after her romantic relationship with John began, she said to her tape recorder: "I'm sure that if Paul had been a woman or something, he would have been a great threat, because there's something definitely very strong between John and Paul."
There is little doubt that John was predominantly heterosexual, but as we've seen, he was also curious about same sex desire.
"I think he had a desire to have sex with men, but I think he was too inhibited," Yoko said in 2015, before modifying herself. "No, not inhibited, he said, 'I don't mind if there's an incredibly attractive guy. It's very difficult, they would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too, and you can't find people like that.'"
It is at least possible that in early 1968, John felt he had found someone like that. Perhaps John was queer in a modern sense, fluid in his preferences, and more so than Paul. He seemed to dream of an all consuming relationship that wrapped music and sex and love into one. Whether or not this is so, what matters is that John felt rejected and abandoned by Paul after Rishikesh. The wounding probably took place inside his head, but that of course doesn't make the pain any less real. In fact, knowing that it was inside his head may have made it worse.
Everyone who watches "Get Back" is struck by the intensity with which Lennon and McCartney hold each other's gaze as they play through endless versions of Two of Us. The two friends spent an unusual amount of their lives looking into each other's eyes...
...John had known Paul planned to leave Rishikesh before him, but even so, he didn't like people leaving. As 1968 went on, he began the painful process of accepting that the one person he regarded as an equal, the one he saw as his best friend and creative soul mate, didn't see him in quite the same way. When John wasn't being looked at by Paul, he didn't know who he was supposed to be.
McCartney has always been adamant that if Lennon had any gay tendencies he would have known about it, but Leslie seems to think that McCartney often failed to pick up on emotional signals from Lennon. Certainly Yoko's testimony is pretty compelling. And the lyrics of "Look at Me" which is on Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band" are pretty suggestive when considered in light of Leslie's discussion, and knowing that Lennon wrote "Look at Me" in India, before he got involved with Yoko in a big way:
Look at me Oh please look at me, my love Here I am Oh my love Who am I? Nobody knows but me Nobody knows but me Who am I? Nobody else can see Just you and me Who are we? Oh my love
He argues that several of the John songs mentioned in the book are about Paul. I have my doubts about some of his claims, but I think he really nails it with Lennon's "I Know (I Know.)" I must have heard this song for the first time, long ago, because I had the vinyl version of the Mind Games album once upon a time, but I wasn't impressed by most of Mind Games except for Bring on the Lucie (Freda People).
But Leslie makes the case that I Know (I Know) is about Paul, and listening to the song now, he is surely right. Here are the lyrics:
The years have passed so quickly
One thing I've understood
I am only learning
To tell the trees from wood
I know what's coming down
And I know where it's coming from
And I know and I'm sorry, yes I am
But I never could speak my mind
And I know just how you feel
And I know now what I have done
And I know, and I'm guilty, yes I am
But I never could read your mind
I know what I was missing
But now my eyes can see
I put myself in your place
As you did for me
Today, I love you more than yesterday
Right now, I love you more right now
I know what's coming down
I can feel where it's coming from
And I know it's getting better all the time
As we share in each other's mind
Today, I love you more than yesterday
Right now, I love you more right now
Ooh, no more crying
Ooh, no more crying
Ooh, no more crying
Ooh, no more crying
The song starts out sounding just like "I've Got a Feeling" which was one of the last songs that Lennon and McCartney worked on equally. Lennon has quoted the titles of Beatles songs several times, most flagrantly in "Glass Onion" and in the infamous "How Do You Sleep," released two years before Mind Games, which was an attack on Paul. It's certain that Lennon knew exactly what the opening to "I Know (I Know)" sounds like.
Lennon mentions "yesterday" which was one of the McCartney song titles he also used in "How Do You Sleep." You can see McCartney performing Yesterday on stage in the video on my December 3, 2025 post. Lennon was absolutely obsessed with writing a song better than Yesterday, which, although attributed to Lennon/McCartney was written entirely by Paul.
The line about put myself in your place as you did for me - in his book, Leslie points out how often McCartney had to defend Lennon from the results of his own poor choices.
I think the "no more crying" line is significant. Leslie shares Mal Evan's testimonial of how McCartney responded when Lennon announced he was leaving the Beatles:
...the 20th of September, Klein convened John Paul and Ringo (George was visiting his mother) at Apple to sign the deals he had negotiated with EMI and capital. The date of this meeting is a little uncertain. It could have been the 16th of September, McCartney's diary entry for that day reads in block capitals THE END. The deals guaranteed the band an increased royalty rate while committing them to make two albums and three singles a year until 1976.
It's unclear how realistic each of The Beatles themselves regarded this commitment as being. After the signing, the three Beatles discussed the future of the group. Paul floated his idea of playing small venues and John, well, Paul has described the moment vividly enough: "John looked at me in the eye and said, well I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you till we signed the capital deal, but I'm leaving the group."
A year later, Lennon recalled it like this: "Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do. So in the end I just said "I think you're daft, I want to divorce."
...in 1975, Mal Evans recalled the meeting and its immediate aftermath."That was really, truly a heartbreaking experience. I drove Paul home and we got to Paul's house and he spent the next hour in the house crying his eyes out."
It seems very likely that Evans had told this recollection to Lennon by the time Lennon was making "Mindgames" during his time in Los Angeles, since Evans was in LA with him.
In addition to the focus on the Lennon-McCartney relationship, "A love story..." has quite a few excellent essays on lots of their songs. I will be discussing those later.
But now, to wrap up all this McLennon shipping, I found this video extremely amusing - the host of this podcast, Carly, is very entertaining, and it's pretty wild to hear the Beatles described by someone from Generation Alpha - or whatever generation she's from, I really can't be bothered to keep track of those generation categories.
Carly gets a few things wrong: she claims they fired Pete Best because he was handsome and that's why they got Ringo - because he was not. In fact, their producer George Martin thought Best was a shit drummer, when they began their recording career, and that's why they got Ringo, who was not only a better drummer, but they felt a more personal rapport with him.
Carly says they played in Berlin - it was Hamburg.
She says the John/Paul trip to Paris was in June for Paul's 21st birthday - it was in October, for John's 21st birthday.
She guesses that the Chunnel existed in the 1960s.
Her description of the "rude mechanicals" scene from "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" which the Beatles performed was: "...a play on Pyramus and Thisbe... I believe it's like a Greek tragedy that Romeo and Juliet are based off of..."
She claims that Patty Boyd told George that the Maharishi was hitting on women, but it was actually Alexis Mardas (aka "Magic Alex") who told George and John.
She mentions Lennon's play, FOUR IN HAND, which is about masturbation and is included in the at-the-time scandalous "Oh! Calcutta!" which I actually didn't really know much about. Thanks to the Internet I was quickly able to find the play. It's not bad at all, although the Wikipedia article claims that the "first draft" was written by Lennon, so who knows how much is was changed by others in however many drafts it took to finish.
I like that Carly defends McCartney's 1970s band Wings, and also that she rightfully excoriates "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" which is one of the worst examples of what a music critic once called McCartney's "rooty-toot persona."
Although now I cannot think of that song without laughing, thanks to comedian Ryan George.
